Let It Flow

When I listened to this record, I found myself thinking about interconnections between performers more than I was hearing. I had never heard of this guy or any of this music before, but it was clearly a record from my father’s side of the collection. The hallmarks were that it was jammy, indulgent, focused on virtuosity, that particular 1970’s sheen. A younger me would have enjoyed it—maybe even greatly—but this incarnation found it lacking, perhaps even tedious.

I don’t find there to be anything profound or evocative about this music, but considering all the different ways one performer can connect with others, how they can be a node in a grand network, that’s equally interesting to me. There’s an idea that I’m obsessed by, the notion of the Great Span, which comes from the diplomat and alleged spy Alger Hiss. It’s an idea propagated by his son, a reminder of the small moments in history, the bucket brigade of people that help us carry forth specific bits of knowledge across time. In introducing the idea to his son, he mentions a story he heard when clerking for Oliver Wendell Holmes, about how the Supreme Court justice fought in the American Civil War, what it was like to be on the battlefield. As a follow-up, Holmes shared a story about his grandmother seeing the beginning of the Revolution when she was in Boston, redcoats marching into town. Through this retelling, Hiss—and others who might collect these personal stories from those who experienced the contingencies of history—becomes a custodian of the memory, passing it forward to the next generation and the next.

I’ve written about this in some ways before, detailing my generational interconnection with the Downtown New York music scene once-removed, so perhaps the idea is old hat to you, dear reader. But, for me, it was was fascinating to learn that Mr. Mason, like Mr. Winwood, came from Traffic. When the band splintered, members of Traffic made their way into Can later on, of course a big band for me. This means that there was a brief period of time where my fathers’ curiosities and obsessions might have converged with mine, where I would have been able to explain to him that I was equally interested in discovering the cross-references between German and British music of the postwar period, that—had either of us kept listening and following the lineage—we would have met comfortably in the middle.

Verdict: Set it Free

Where are you in the bucket brigade?